LOS ANGELES—Microsoft arrived at E3 following a series of strong platform-centric announcements, having reversed course on complaints like pre-packaged Kinect sensors, Xbox Live Gold subscription requirements for media, and new video streaming partners like HBO Go. Fittingly, the company opened its pre-E3 presser with a declaration that its E3 would be all about games, and those games came in droves. But once the dust settled, we started to sort out which of its announced fare was Xbox exclusive and scheduled for this year.

The list, honestly, was shorter than we’d expected, which at least made wrapping up Microsoft’s E3 presence an easy task. But the biggest potential series, Halo, will only appear in semi-remastered form in the rehashed Master Chief Collection. What exclusive fare is left to convince Xbox One doubters that this holiday is the time to buy?

Sunset Overdrive

Enlarge/ Staying in the air and firing at the same time wasn't as easy as we'd have liked in Sunset Overdrive.

As Insomniac Games’ first Xbox-exclusive project edges closer to completion, it stands out as the console’s most intriguing entry this coming holiday. Between an E3 trailer that openly mocked military gaming tropes and a Technicolor art style that demands eyeballs, Sunset Overdrive managed to perk our jaded eyebrows. But once we strapped in with a controller in hand, our expectations were thrown onto a rollercoaster.

That’s because the game’s SLC Punk attitude doesn’t appear to revolutionize the third-person-shooting game within, which cobbles from Ratchet and Clank’s wild weapon selection and Jet Set Radio’s rail-hopping speed. We gave the game’s Night Defense mode a shot, which had us laying traps and blasting waves of enemies. In short, it felt almost identical to Gears of War’s Horde mode, the only differentiation being that players could fling themselves around the arena faster than in Gears by way of gliding and grinding on level elements like rollercoaster lines.

That acrobatic stuff looks amazing in trailer form, but in practice, moving on a fixed grind adds an incredible amount of camera management to the task of tracking and blasting bad guys (and staying on the ground got us killed quickly and often). Once we got foes in our cross-hairs, the game’s range of freezing, ricocheting, and exploding weapons did the trick, and the Batman-cartoon style of their explosions, complete with comic book-style words forming in clouds, was impressive.

Sunset Overdrive’s learning curve, particularly in requiring perfectly-timed taps to land on grinds, seems intentionally steep, as if to imply that this is a game for seasoned shooting fans. If that were truly the case, we wish Insomniac had unveiled a few more experiments in this playable preview beyond the acrobatic-aiming stuff. Maybe it will be easier to get into with some practice following its October 28 release.

Forza Horizon 2

Enlarge/ The rain sure looks pretty, but we weren't all that impressed with how Forza Horizon 2 handled its slick road surfaces.

With every release of a new Forza Motorsport sim-racing game, complaints about the series’ lack of weather modeling have gathered like an incoming fog. "We want to drive expensive cars through crappy weather!" fans insist. Well, here’s your danged weather in a Forza game—and the muddy, drive-through-fields variant of Forza Horizon 2, at that.

Super-zoomed shots of rain beads and mud stains on the demo’s Lamborghini and Nissan options lead us into a race, but once the wheels started turning, the beads gave way to a gorgeous-looking demo that felt surprisingly awkward to complete. Our biggest issue was that the series’ long-standing “green line,” the one racers are encouraged to follow, didn’t react very well to the open-world nature of Horizon’s rally-style driving.

Our single session saw the line take us down inefficient paths quite often. We chalked this up to the game’s incomplete state. We were more concerned about how the line didn’t react at all once rain hit the course midway through. In spite of newly slickened roads, we had to steady our steeling wheels and pound the brakes a good half-second before the line told us to. Couple that with some pronounced framerate dips and two noticeably glitchy sliding moments, both on roads without a drop of water, and we walked away understanding just why Turn 10 has taken so long to add weather effects to its otherwise incredibly tuned racing franchise.

Ori and the Blind Forest

Enlarge/ Cute graphis meet with some cute puzzles in the enchanting, Metrodivania-style Ori and the Blind Forest.

Mystical creatures and hand-drawn set-pieces that look almost directly ripped from Studio Ghibli films immediately drew our attention to Ori and the Blind Forest. Sadly, we realized the 2D adventure game was yet another entry in the well-trodden Metroidvania genre, but by the time we connected those dots, we’d been sucked in by the game’s art direction and high-speed combat system.

Ori, the spritely pixie-thingie who leads this adventure, immediately stood out as a quick and capable creature, and it glowed with a firefly-like companion as we ran through a cavern bathed in stunning blues and purples. Enemies were dispatched with our floating companion, which auto-hit nearby enemies, as if Rayman’s fists were a little smarter. If an auto-homing melee attack sounds too simplified for you, worry not; you’ll still need to hop and dodge like a madman to avoid the game’s crafty, early foes (not to mention deal with some Super Meat Boy-esque platforming to proceed).

We also needed to collect stones and energy balls to progress through the game’s apparently large map; the stones would unlock doors, while energy could be spent on anything from special door unlocks to maneuvers to save points, meaning players would actually have to weigh their decisions in a Metroidvania game for once. Puzzle platformers are a dime a dozen these days, but what we saw in the way of high-speed action and cute puzzles made us optimistic that Ori won’t suffer from Metroidvania games’ worst tropes.

Fable Legends

Enlarge/ Odd, tablet-heavy gameplay has us worried about the eventual playerbase for Fable Legends.

Beware the "Fable" tag on this co-op action game. Fans who love the series because of quests that revolve heavily around good and evil decisions should temper their expectations, at least if Fable Legends' playable E3 debut is any consideration. While the game will include good-and-evil options in its hub towns, this game takes total player customization away from its heroes, instead putting them in the shoes of pre-designed archetypes who team up to battle in action-packed sequences.

We're happy to report that the battling is smooth and engaging enough, particularly in how it requires warriors to team up and assist each other's weaknesses to get through lengthy fights against giant nasties. Our demo had us battling against a single human opponent who viewed the battle from a top-down perspective (on an Xbox, not a Smartglass device). It was that player's job to make our battle as miserable as possible by not only hiding waves of enemies but also reacting to our movements and creating destructible walls. Our squad of heroes temporarily lost a healer and mage to such a blockade a few times, which let the villainous player land some key blows before we could freeze and assist as needed.

However, this was no gorgeous example of Xbox One's hardware, with low-polygon characters and underwhelming effects in everything from foliage to lighting to our mage's freeze spells. The game's requirement of a villain player in every session, who is pulled out of direct action to engage in tablet-style micro-management, also has us anxious about the playerbase we can expect upon the game's launch. But as this remains Xbox One's biggest upcoming co-op RPG, we can only hope it will ship with enough Fable-style personalization and deep systems to earn the series' name.

D4

Enlarge/ If you want to wave your arms in front of a crazy story from Deadly Premonition's Swery, D4 is your game.

In spite of Microsoft’s recent announcements, Kinect 2.0 still exists as an Xbox One game controller, and it’s not just the stuff of dance and workout titles. Famed Japanese design weirdo Swery (creator of Deadly Premonition) has come forth with a hard-boiled story game for Kinect called D4. The title stands for “Dark Dreams Don’t Die,” but after our brief time with the game, we sure wish Kinect would keel over.

Swery’s latest demo lived up to his reputation for content, at least. This five-minute demo opened with a detective from Boston named David Young falling into a bathtub with a high-heeled shoe in one hand, and he quickly began blurting overdramatic phrases like, “My mind is full of memories of my wife, and a bullet that robs me of them.” He’s been on the hunt for his wife’s murderer for two years.

Calling this a “game” misses the point, as Swery seemed more interested in telling a linear story with minor, dramatic motions to engross viewers. We craned our neck to look for clues in a room, pushed a rushing, angry person away, and swiped a hand to cross a suspect’s name off a list. "Vaguely interactive TV show" might be a bit closer to the experience.

The trouble was, every gesture required at least two attempts to compute, so the word “immersive” absolutely didn’t apply. While D4 has been announced as being Kinect-optional, we can see why Swery would want players to wave and gesture—to fall into the game’s intentionally over-the-top plot in a way that quick button taps might not elicit. If Kinect 2.0 played nicely with our gestures, we’d agree. (Worth noting, this game doesn't have a release date assigned yet, but this was the game's first major, playable reveal.)